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What do you like best?

I'm used Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot and Eloqua extensively. I have been admin over each of these systems for the last 6 years. Having used Eloqua, the "Cadillac" of marketing automation I've got a good insight into what Marketo is and is not.

Marketo is easy to use, quick to setup and an all around good medium level tool. It does everything my company (60 employees) needs. In the past, though I did have to hack it and build work arounds frequently to get more advanced functionality out of it. In the last few years, though, Marketo seems to have surpassed Eloqua in functionality and ease-of-use.

Overall though, I LOVE Marketo and think it's a great tool for the majority of SMBs.

What do you dislike?

UPDATE 2/14/2017 - Coming back to revise this review years later as I've seen Marketo grow and improve. 2 and 3, below, are no longer a problem. Marketo has more integrations now than Eloqua (#3). The API has been greatly improved in Marketo too (#2). #1 is still kind of an issue.

Having used Eloqua, I know how nice their campaign/program builder is. You can drag and drop build your campaigns on a canvas type layout. It's great because it's easy, gives a better top down view of your campaign, and helps you display a campaigns functionality to your executive team. Infusionshoft has something similar. Why Marketo hasn't adopted a similar format for building programs is beyond me.

A few other beefs I have with Marketo are:

1. Form and Landing Page Builder are pretty bad. Marketo has admitted that these two pieces of their tool are the only remaining remnants of their original tool (which wasn't even for marketing automation BTW... Marketo's first tool was an Adwords management interface). Marketo has also said they're aware the form/landing page builders are junky and have said they're going to be rolling out new versions though they wouldn't commit to a timeline for roll out.

2. Their API is weak sauce. I wanted to bring some of our customer renewal emails into Marketo (instead of having our DEV team send them out with our in-house PHP scripts), but we need to send out customer keys (like product licensing keys) in the emails and the Marketo API didn't really have a way to do it. We had to build a work around, which after I planned it out the DEV team kicked it down the road because it'd be too time consuming and they had higher priorities.

3. The third party integrations aren't quite there yet. They've launched a "LaunchPoint" marketplace where you can go and view their partners, but sadly most of these partners do not have any integration with Marketo yet. Eloqua had some pretty extensive integrations that I miss not having in Marketo. However, Marketo has a larger market of partners and most of them are currently working on integrations, so it's only a matter of time before Marketo overtakes Eloqua in 3rd party integrations.

Recommendations to others considering the product

For most SMBs I'd suggest using Marketo over Eloqua, Silverpop, Pardot, or other marketing automation suites. i've used Eloqua heavily, and while the tool is powerful, the overall interface (even the E10 interface which I have used) still falls short of what Marketo offers. I've evaluated both Silverpop and Pardot and both of those don't offer the bang for buck that Marketo does.

If budget is a real concern to you you may want to try ActOn. I set it up for a client and it fits their needs quite well, though their needs aren't that great.

If you are a newer company and sell stuff, and don't need to use SalesForce for a CRM I'd suggest InfusionSoft. InfusionSoft is more affordable than Marketo though it too lacks some of the Marketo functionality.

All around, I'm pleased with Marketo as a tool and even more pleased with it as a company. Though I've had some limited support issues with Marketo, they are generally responsive. As a company they're doing some awesome things and applying a lot of pressure to Eloqua, as they have quicker development cycles and seem to be a more agile company.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

In using Hubspot and Pardot in the past, I've run into major hurdles with quickly launching new campaigns and with flexibility in reporting. Marketo makes both of these tasks very easy!

What do you like best?

The shear power of the platform. "Out of the box", Marketo doesn't do a whole lot. It requires careful planning, design, customizing, configuring, etc. to reflect how your business is structured and operates. It took us over a year to fully deploy Marketo across our global organization. But now that it's aligned to how we go to Market (and how we report on our overall effectiveness), Marketo has become the core (and most powerful) Marketing platform for us. Central to all of this is our highly complex lead lifecycle workflows that assign, route, classify and track the progression of any lead that becomes marketing-qualified/sales-ready. The real-time alerts - and the ability to make these as detailed as possible using variable tokens - are what really got us aligned with our Sales teams.

It's also worth mentioning that the number of passionate Marketo customers/users is part of a very vibrant and active online community. The "Marketo Marketing Nation Community" - which is a huge value-add - consists of many members who enjoy helping others with their Marketo challenges, sharing best practices, influencing/shaping the future of the Marketo platform, and overall enabling us all to connect with one another. And each year, we all have the opportunity to meet and network with one another at the amazing Marketo Summit user conference.

What do you dislike?

The main weakness in Marketo is some of its reporting capabilities (without purchasing add-ons like MPI and Advanced Report Builder). Not only for very tactical reporting (e.g., emails, where it would be so useful to be able to view the leads behind the numbers without having to create a separate "smart list") but for meaningful reporting that global organizations like ours are most concerned with - and that's account-centric/ABM level reporting. For example, the ability to view all relevant activity (aka, "interesting moments") of all leads within a given account is not possible. To overcome many of these weaknesses/limitations (except the account-level reporting), an absolute must is to opt for the add-on module (separate data warehouse and BI tool): either your own (using bulk API extract) or Advanced Report Builder. Now that Marketo has recently acquired Bizible, this should give Marketo a leg up in the ability to report on true multi-touch engagement.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I can’t underestimate the importance of having access to a Marketo senior consultant (not only during initial deployment, but ongoing), with whom you can collaborate on issues, prior lessons-learned, best-practices, implementation approaches, and general Marketo technology/platform challenges. It was also imperative that our consultant had a solid understanding of our CRM environment – especially when that environment is not SFDC (we use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Online). Our consultant has been an invaluable member of our extended team!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Prior to deploying Marketo, our overall maturity level of the marketing function was low. We understood the need to develop core competencies in demand generation but historically communicated to the market ad-hoc with “spray and pray” email campaigns). A demand generation function was still being established within our organization. Sales had demanded that Marketing become more involved and integrated in building the Sales pipeline and the overall sales process (including data integration). Sales and pipeline growth were unable to be tied back to marketing efforts, making it difficult to measure Marketing ROI.

We are now have a fully integrated Marketo and CRM platform, resulting in a true closed-loop lead management system to properly route, assign, accept/recycle, qualify/disqualify, convert, progress, and track leads throughout the integrated sales & marketing funnel. Every single marketing activity - whether it's online or offline - is captured in Marketo and tied to a Marketo program. We now use Marketo as our central reporting platform that feed into our corporate quarterly scorecards. This has truly been a game-changer for us.

With Marketo, the creativeness and innovativeness of how we engage with our prospects and clients, how we offer them a relevant/personalized experience and how we measure overall marketing effectiveness will continue to evolve. We have many exciting enhancements underway – most notably, further integrating Marketo into our new website platform, Sitecore. With Marketo, Sitecore and other niche platforms, we hope to be in a position to offer our website visitors – specifically key target accounts – a highly personalized, customized and relevant experience as they engage across our digital channels.

What do you like best?

Marketo is the best of the best. From prospects to customers, lead routing to triggered activities, Marketo helps get our leads to the right people in record time. It's not only helped track our leads more precisely, but allowed us to discover trends. Not only is Marketo itself wonderful, but its ability to integrate with Salesforce provides our team with the data they want and need to make decisions. My favorite feature, and will always be my favorite feature, is the Marketo smart list. Smart list are a godsend. They're perfect for slicing and dicing data exactly how you'd like.

What do you dislike?

Marketo's abilities are far superior to other marketing automation products. It's only downfalls are that sync times can be slow if there are large data updates - pretty common amongst Marketo automation products, so not specific to Marketo. It's reporting abilities are also nothing spectacular. They get the job done, but most of our reporting is done outside of Marketo.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo is far superior to other marketing automation systems. It's definitely by far the best I've used.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We're able to deliver the right leads to the right people in record time. This has allowed our team to follow-up quickly and get the conversation started. We're also able to track activities and send alerts to the appropriate people which is *huge* for many of our internal teams. Most of all, we're able to integrate Marketo with other marketing technology that's allowed us to track across the customer journey even better.

What do you like best?

If you are a growing business, then the use of Marketo is a definite must. The way that sales contacts are put into a pipeline for easy tracking will make it easy to focus on your product or service, not on how to get more buyers on the hook.

The customer service Marketo has to offer is some of the best in the world. I have called with questions about how to onboard a client, how to sort contacts, how to update API settings for a custom analytics dashboard...each and every one of my questions has been answered in a professional manner. I do not spend much time on call waiting, and the answers I need are quickly provided by a friendly customer support rep when I call in.

What do you dislike?

The training materials for a new user may not help if you are not familiar with marketing automation. There is a learning curve here, so make sure that you or any employee or contractor that will use Marketo on your behalf is familiar with marketing lingo.

There are a lot of tutorial videos available from the knowledge base, and most questions I have seem to get answered by third parties (Stack Overflow in particular), so this is not too much of a problem.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Check out the trial options if you are not sure about your need for marketing automation, but Marketo is great if your business is in need of it.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

My client had thousands of contacts that were totally unsorted. Marketo made it easy to organize each client by size, industry and budget. Moving contacts from potential customers to actual return on investment was a fluid process with Marketo, and ongoing business strategy is also easy to oversee thanks to this tool.

What do you like best?

What I like best about Marketo is that you can make your marketing as simple or complex as you want to for your business needs. I also like that it is easy to navigate, and in the past few months, I've noticed improved experiences with Marketo customer service staff.

What do you dislike?

I dislike how long it takes to learn Marketo and all that you can do with it. To be fair, I came to Marketo from Pardot and when we switched systems, we had a very short timeframe to rebuild what we had been using in Pardot (web forms, drip campaigns for one of our brands, autoresponder emails, etc) into Marketo in a 3 month timeframe, which didn't get a lot of extra time to actually learn all the features of Marketo and properly set it up.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are considering Marketo, I would recommend making sure your company understands the work that will be needed to set Marketo up correctly and have an implementation plan ready (what fields you will map from Marketo to your CRM, what data do you want to report on so you can set up your campaigns/custom fields correctly, etc). Also, make sure you have an IT person on your implementation team who can help set up field mapping and, if you are a non-Salesforce user like we are, they will be helpful when setting up whatever connector you choose to go with (we use Vertify).

Marketo also seems to have more free how-to videos available now that will be helpful to watch before you dog in to your setup.

It really is a powerful marketing automation tool, but will take a long time to fully understand it's capabilities (I'm 2 years in now and still don't know everything!)

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We switched to Marketo from Pardot in order to be able to market multiple brands from one Marketo account (which we were not able to do with Pardot). We are automating more of our process across brands with Marketo and working on better customization/perosnalization to our customers. The benefits we've realized are that we can build more complex email campaigns in Marketo, we've found it easier to build/customize emails, we can pull more in-depth data on our customers, and pass leads to our sales reps more efficiently.

What do you like best?

I like the seamless integration with Salesforce.com. I also like the level of automation that Marketo brings to the table. It's a "set it and forget it" scenario when it comes to setting up multi-touch email programs. Marketo provides invaluable insight on leads that makes sales reps' lives easier (which is our jobs as marketers, right?!). Sales reps are able to find information on their on about all the marketing campaigns going on, who's participated, and can figure out how to prioritize leads accordingly - ALL ON THEIR OWN! One of my favorite programs in Marketo is their automation for promoting and managing virtual events. Webinars are a great lead generation tool especially when they are done right, and Marketo allows for that!

What do you dislike?

Since Marketo is such a robust tool, the learning curve to achieve a certain level of efficiency within it can be daunting.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo is a robust product with a lot to offer, including a great integration with Salesforce.com. Marketo allows you to streamline and automate all lead generation activities as well as reporting. The programs that Marketo allows you to run on your database like lead scoring, nurturing, lifecycle tracking, are huge when it comes to taking your marketing department to the next level!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have resolved the ability to allow reps to self-help and prioritize their own leads by implementing lead scoring. Another big win has been the ability to create our own marketing funnel and attain metrics on a lead's pre-sales journey by implementing a lead lifecycle model and taking advantage of the out of the box Success Path Analyzer report.

What do you like best?

Marketo's features make it easy to build standardized programs and copy them for other uses. This is an awesome feature as it saves me a ton of time. I can build a nurture program for product A, spend 2 weeks setting it up and checking for quality, and then execute. I can then take that same campaign and set it up for product B, spend 1 day checking for quality, and then execute. A huge savings!

What do you dislike?

Recommendations to others considering the product

Do not underestimate the value of a good partner when implementing Marketo. You may have to spend a little more to partner with a top agency, but that work will pay off in the long run. A good partner will help you build your processes with an eye towards best practices. There are many opportunities to create long-term problems with Marketo if you do not carefully consider your implementation plans.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our company has been able to significantly scale our use of marketing automation and has realized tangible revenue generated via Marketo programs. The platform has made it easy for us to communicate with thousands of our customers in a way that we could not previously do.

What do you like best?

As a demand gen marketer, Marketo does pretty much everything you need. From creating gated landing pages, syncing to your CRM system, and showing lead activity in your CRM, you can create all of the activities and campaigns needed to generate awareness to creating a sales qualified lead.

It's a bit scary looking, but fairly intuitive once you start digging in. I've used other email marketing and marketing automation tools, never had formal training on Marketo, but have used it without any problems for the past few years.

What do you dislike?

The Marketo UX is in need of an update. Having folders is wonderful, but it's pretty difficult to find anything within those folders, the search functionality is lacking. In creating program flows, it would be really useful to have a visual workflow.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I've used Marketo mainly for lead nurturing programs, monthly newsletter campaigns, weekly email campaigns, and lead scoring that combines email response and web activity. We're able to take outbound prospected leads, figure out who is more active, and build a robust audience base for our field and other marketing efforts.

What do you like best?

Its integration with Salesforce and the power it has to run countless programs and nurture streams is great. Designing the emails in the interface and then setting the audience directly after is nice.

What do you dislike?

The loading time on it is sometimes pretty ridiculous, and there are a lot of areas that the design of the actual software could look much better and be more intuitive. There is a weird glitch with our current HTML that causes a button with the exact same HTML as another button to be a different font and size, and support didn't help in figuring out why it acts that way.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you don't use Salesforce or haven't already started using Marketo, it would be valuable to look at other options. But I could see choosing Marketo still, based on your needs and environment. Good for enterprise companies.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We automate all of our marketing emails out of the platform, and the trust I have in it to send them out when scheduled is good.

What do you like best?

Marketo is an incredible robust platform, with built-in capabilities for custom code, landing pages, email campaigns, integrating with Facebook and Google Ads and even customizing content based on user behavior for better CRO.

What do you dislike?

It's prohibitively expensive for many companies, and not just because of the actual product cost but also the man-hours necessary to implement the solution, review the documentation, and design your programs. Not only that, but if you want to do anything other than the most basic tasks you need a developer familiar with Marketo's own quirks to implement, which is probably the biggest drawback to the platform.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If evaluating, compare to options like Infusionsoft and Hubspot which are less robust but focus more on usability, and ask yourself what investment you are truly willing to make in transitioning essentially your entire marketing department to this platform.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo collects all your data from different campaigns in one place very effectively. My PPC campaigns can trigger email drips which capture behavior data which change the landing pages I show a prospect.

What do you like best?

I most like that you can track ROI on your campaigns. It provides a lot more insight into what is working well and what doesn't work well. I like that Marketo listens to their customers and continues to add new features that make it easier to do our job and meet business objectives.

What do you dislike?

I would like to be able to subscribe to smart lists not just reports. - Update: They have added the feature to allow me to subscribe to smart lists.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Look at all of the features that they are able to provide you with to help you better engage your customers.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are able to determine ROI for each campaign and determine the best solution to the business problems we are answering. We are able to increase our highly qualified sales leads that we can pass to our sales team.

What do you like best?

Marketo is a great platform that allows for a lot of flexibility in functionality. They have an excellent culture around their product and their online community is unmatched. The tool itself is very powerful and can be manipulated in many ways to make a wide variety of marketing campaigns work.

What do you dislike?

The initial lift to get Marketo going makes it a large endeavor to take on and lack of ready-to-go pre-made templates. There are some limitations to the platform from an administration side that make it a bit burdensome, such as not being able to bulk delete programs, approval workflow, limitation in naming duplicates and being able to centralize and control how program and design templates are used.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Invest time and effort into Marketo University and take the courses to understand how Marketo works before diving in.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Marketo for our marketing automation. We appreciate the flexibility that Marketo allows and the integrations we can incorporate. We have several users that are trained and certified in the platform and have invested heavily in our staff to take advantage of the tool. This tool offers a lot of hidden functionality to track the actions of users interacting with content that was generated in Marketo or that is linked to Marketo via munchkin codes. We've been able to take advantage of lead scoring and sales insight tools to empower our sales teams based on customer activities. Marketo has allowed us to automate our day-to-day transactions and automate communications with our sales force and respond quickly to our prospects.

What do you like best?

Marketo's integration with Salesforce is second to none. Being able to see near real-time updates in Salesforce guarantees accurate data as well an supports transparency to build trust. Marketo has also enabled functionality such as cloning and tokens that allows marketers to scale the setup of of their marketing programs and assets very easily. They also have an incredible partner network that supports a highly integrated marketing tech stack.

What do you dislike?

Marketo's reporting features are just average. While you can get the data you need, it's often awkwardly presented and in an inconsistent matter. More and more, we are finding ourselves using 3rd party providers and dashboard tools to report on Marketo data.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you are considering Marketo, I would think through how you are going to implement and what your support team will look like long term. Marketo is not an app - it is a business-changing operations platform that will revolutionize the way your sales and marketing teams do business.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

At the foundation, Marketo allows us to manage leads through the sales cycle, track the success of our marketing initiatives and ultimately allows us to make better decisions on how to spend our marketing budget. We are tracking velocity of our leads through the sales funnel, percentage of opportunities and pipeline generated and influenced, and top performing channels and programs. Marketo is often thought of as an email service provider. I would argue that it just happens to send emails.

What do you like best?

Marketo is the most scalable and robust Marketing Automation platform on the market today and it continues to innovate to enable today's Marketers to deliver pipeline for the organizations they support. Marketo is an extremely well integrated solution that can support a wide variety of strategies, from traditional demand gen content marketing, to highly targeted account-based marketing initiatives. One of the features that really sets Marketo apart from the competition is its advanced smart campaign functionality. The robust nature of Marketo campaigns make advanced targeting and workflows possible, including the ability to control the order in which activities process. This is made possible with the use of requested campaigns and webhooks. Another feature that I have to mention is the native email cast functionality within Marketo's Engagement programs. From an email marketing perspective, the host of features available in this program type are unsurpassed by any other product on the market.

What do you dislike?

My dislikes of Marketo typically only arise from user error, which is simply to say that they are avoidable. Marketo is the best solution on the market. The advanced functionality that it makes available to it's users is exceptional, but can be problematic when managed improperly. Having educated specialists and well defined user roles are key for maintaining an efficiently managed Marketo instance. Just like with code or query development, it is possible to get to the end result in an efficient way but also possible to build programs that create inefficient processing at scale.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo is really the only marketing automation solution worth considering if you're a B2B Marketing organization that looking to scale.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I use Marketo to support demand gen and abm strategies to deliver reliable pipeline to Sales. I'm constantly working with Sales to optimize lead flow and conversion rates. For this, I've found that a flexible Lifecycle processing architecture is key. Having clearly defined yet flexible Lifecycle / buyers stages is key to measuring and improving marketing funnel conversion rates.

What do you dislike?

No automation tool is perfect. There are pros and hence, there are cons -

1) Their mobile based application is useless. It is only capable of giving you a snapshot of your data and cannot do much in terms of operational capability.

2) Reporting should be made more robust is what I feel. It is super easy to generate a report directly on Salesforce rather than coming back to Marketo for answers.

2) Pricing, but I guess in terms of quality, the product is premium as well. Not suitable for small size companies.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo is an expensive tool, hence before you make your decision, look at their value proposition and what it has to offer as well. It is more suitable for a mid-sized organization and above.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

1) Marketo helps us generate more qualified leads every month. It is our go-to platform to nurture our leads, & run email campaigns.

2) Marketo manages our entire database. Being a B2B firm, working on the Inbound sales model, we have a lot of leads coming in and going out. All of this is taken care of seamlessly by the robust programs built in the Marketo platform. Its integration with Salesforce makes everything easier.

What do you like best?

1. Ability to scale. You can easily reproduce programs and campaigns. Its easy to copy a program. All your marketing assets, lists and workflows are already reproduced and re-connected. Makes it very easy to work with templates.

2. Strongest integration with Salesforce CRM. Custom fields, mappings and values are automatically recognized. You can run a Marketo query within minutes of creating a new field in Salesforce CRM. No need to manually map anything.

3. Rich ecosystem of apps and partners make Marketo your best solution to achieve all your modern marketing objectives.

4. Organization Structure. You can easily navigate to different sections of the application in just a few clicks. The extensive folder structure is a great help to keep everything organized.

What do you dislike?

Marketo could do a better job at allowing you to tag and sort different components of the system. This would come more handy in various reporting needed.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Highly recommend Marketo as a marketing automation platform.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

- Scale in marketing operations

- Building a strong marketing database composed of data from different systems

What do you like best?

The ease of use and the great reporting features. I really like being able to create smart lists to pull specific data I need to drive other business goals. Great tool for A/B Testing! Allows for us to show regional how messaging works for one region and not another. We are also able to make changes for smaller regions if needed.

What do you dislike?

sometimes it kicks me out when I am in the middle of building a campaign.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Take the time to see how it can improve your email automation. This tool will save you a lot of time and allow for more complex campaign nurtures to happen so you can focus on other business needs. I would recommend the too to any business that has a large customer base and needs to balance messaging and new updates. If you are into reporting this tool also allows for great analysis to dig into what is or isnt working. Great Product and great support when ever we need it! Also it integrates with SALESFORCE and is a huge plus for my company and for sales!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use it to send our emails to our customers and make sure we don't over send messaging. Helps us keep sales in line for sending tons of emails on their own. We have been able to show improved email performance with reporting and adjusted messaging to improve customer engagement. Great tool for A/B Testing!

What do you like best?

Marketo is an extremely flexible marketing automation system for everything from lead management to email marketing to personalization and more. From a lead management perspective, it is easy to create segments, prioritize leads, and manage fields/information on your leads. For email marketing, it it is easy to create, schedule, send emails, and run all the analytics you need to track them.

What do you dislike?

Once you start running highly segmented lists on tens and hundreds of thousands of leads, Marketo will be very slow. There are some integrations as well that may break as you scale (like with your CRM). Support is also very slow to help resolve issues. It often takes multiple escalations before you get an answer.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Lead management, email marketing, marketing tracking. The benefits of a marketing automation solution are immeasurable as marketing touches every deal that we have in the business and things like lead management and email marketing are integral to our success.

What do you like best?

If you have other products you are using, its great to know their is usually an integration with Marketo, It makes it so much easier to have tools that can be used together. Marketo is also a very powerful tool and can be used a variety of ways by different users.

What do you dislike?

Would like an easier way to manage images. Such as see what is in a folder with thumbnail views. This part is a little bit cumbersome.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Cost maybe an issue to some, but having a tool that you know that isn't going to disappear tomorrow is vital. Marketo also has great communities and email insights that add value to any Marketo admin and marketing team.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Great to manage your marketing list needs and nurture programs. Being able to see insights to leads is vital to understand your message effectiveness and also your audience. Great being able to segment into a variety of groups in a very effective way.

What do you like best?

Marketo is unlike any other platform I have worked with in the automation and email space. Everything organized in groups and based around the record itself.

Most platforms are segmented where you have landing pages in one area, emails in another, and automated workflows (drips) built in a completely separate place. Marketo brings all of this together inside a single program and it makes navigating the system so much easier!

Also, the insights on a record is also quite remarkable, my sales team and clients' sales teams love the information they are provided on a record and the recent engagements that record has done.

What do you dislike?

I do not like the approval process, if I make adjustments to a template and know they are correct, I should be able to push them across all assets and not have to go through individually and approve these.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are creating full demand generation programs centered around Marketo. Feeding the inbound data along with lead information and seeing the full cycle reporting once that lead has become an opportunity and eventually a customer.

Sales Enablement, creating a life cycle work flow and series of alerts that keeps the sales team up to speed on what their prospects and current customers are doing. Giving the sales team more time to focus on true prospects and while the leads continue to be nurtured until ready to buy.

What do you like best?

Marketing Automation is inherently confusing and difficult for users whose roles are not dedicated to MAP. When you have a decentralized model (which many companies do regardless of size), it can be extremely difficult to ensure that functionality is user friendly and meets your needs as a company. Marketo wins in this arena. In the past I've struggled with software that was too often a problem instead of a solution where the interface was too technical, too clunky, not intuitive. Where training consisted of a lot of specific one-off situations and users reached out constantly for a customized set up on virtually every campaign because the template wasn't flexible enough (or there wasn't the ability to create a template!). Marketo transcends those issues and makes it a lot easier to support users in different places geographically or departmentally.

What do you dislike?

There are some reporting capabilities that could be more comprehensive - you can get the data it's the format it comes in that can be difficult in some cases or not quite what you expect or not in the module you expect.

Support is not always the easiest to get a hold of, depending on the issue. There are some rock stars (looking at you Jimmy!) who keep you up to date and are awesome and others that are not great at keeping you in the loop.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are building a demand generation engine where Marketo is at the core processing our records from a variety of channels, providing history and normalizing data and then letting us pull that into first, last and multi-touch attribution reporting.

What do you like best?

The program is so robust -- if the solution is so robust that if there isn't an obvious solution, chances are it's still possible. We've had some struggles (see the dislikes below) but I still whole-heartedly love the program.

What do you dislike?

We use purposeful duplicates and Marketo still has yet to come up with a good solution. We, also, use Microsoft Dynamics and the native integration is the ugly step-child and regardless of what they say, it has A LOT of issues.

Also, I would mention that their sales wing feels very much disconnected from the rest of the people you interact with. They're pushy and work hard to close a deal... which was off-putting. Also, I'd use an outside agency for my launch pack/Marketo help if I had it to do over again.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be extremely clear on your use cases -- things you see as potential roadblocks and have the sales team work through them and show you clear ways around them. Otherwise you may end up with a lot of "sure we can do that" and realize that may not be the case later on (or that it will cost $20,000 to accomplish).

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use an agency model and it's the only program that allows us to market in that way without a lot of cumbersome work-arounds. It's been amazing for automating programs, creating gated content and measuring our success... and we're only scratching the surface.

What do you like best?

I love that Marketo is easy #1! You can get up and running with minimal resources and time as well as understand how to use the tool in a basic function. The interface is user friendly, not bulky, and easy to navigate. My favorite functionality is that Marketo integrates seamlessly with most products and tools - and honestly most initiatives that marketers need to accomplish can be done with Marketo alone.

What do you dislike?

I dislike when Marketo isn't set up properly the first time or when people are not using it to its full functionality.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure when setting up Marketo that you set it up the correct way to begin with and take the time needed to understand its full functionality to get the most out of the tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are able to communicate with our database via email and track actions taken. From there we are able to view where leads are within our sales funnel at any given time, how long they are in each stage for and how long the actual sales cycle takes. We are able to send buyer/industry specific content out to the right person at the right time to nurture them on their way to conversion. We are able to identify our most promising prospects and drive them to conversion in an efficient manner.

What do you like best?

Great for working with multiple different business models. Capable of scale, a significant level of customisation available out of the box. Easy to organise according to your preference, and if you build well, it's possible to keep under a tight reign even at enterprise scale. Lots of integrations with other tools

What do you dislike?

The sheer volume of possibilities can sometimes be difficult to fathom. It's both a blessing and a curse. In the APAC region, data sovereignty can be an issue with a lot of the third party tools, so some business do require a custom APIs for some features.

Its UX is not the prettiest, and for the most part it does require you to know how to code or have access to resource that can. But if it's a give and take for customisation and flexibility, I'm okay with that.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you've struggled with systems that are unable to cope with the complexity of your system and data structure, Marketo could be a good option. It typically requires a higher level of technical maturity within an organisation and does benefit from having a "power user" - someone who is willing to learn it in depth and take ownership of it.

Support, while on occasion a tad slower than I would like, is typically helpful and knowledgeable about the product.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

In my own experience and with my clients, "marketing automation" actually is automated - there's always manual setting up, but it's far more efficient in Marketo than I've seen in any other platform. I (and my clients) get to see the benefits of speaking to our customers in a way that is relevant, timely, and targeted. Setting up and training is definitely not cheap, either time wise or cost wise, but the return is worth it.

What do you like best?

The ease of use and the ability to jump right in. I do not need to spend hours in a class to learn where everything is and how to execute something. I get to jump right in, watch a quick video and make things happen.

What do you dislike?

sometimes simple is not always the best thing. I would love the ability to use some of the competitors feature in here. We need to be able to utilize responsive design in everything. I do not like having to find workarounds for some of these more advanced features that should be built in.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Its a great tool that can get you moving in the right direction. It will not do everything as there is not a tool on the market that does, however I do know it fulfills many of the key items everyday Marketers need.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I get to automate the decision making of what happens next. I have helped my clients increase click-through rate, the responsiveness of their lists and increase ROI for all marketing programs. I leverage Marketo for most interactions with our clients from marketing to leads and supporting sales with campaigns, to onboarding Customers and supporting cross-sales programs.

I am able to take the data that Marketo is collecting from the Munchkin and the campaigns and make decisions what to do next. We build reports that tell us which programs are working and which are duds. This, in turn, helps us spend our small marketing budget more effectively, which leads to better results quarter over quarter.

What do you like best?

The Marketo platform goes beyond email and helps marketers create a marketing ecosystem that can encompass full lifecycle marketing for your leads and prospects

What do you dislike?

Marketo is like walking into a hardware store - it has everything you need to build your home however this doesn't mean that you'll make some very bad DIY mistakes. With Marketo It is easy to miss steps that could be very important for future marketing initiatives and reporting, and can be frustrating if you have to rearchitect your campaigns down the line.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Now seeing Marketo from the agency side, I can see more use cases and examples of how Marketo really is the cream of the crop for Marketing Automation. It is the most robust email marketing platform, it can help align marketing and sales through scoring, account based marketing improvements and sales insight. For the marketer there is a huge feature set without needing IT to manage the platform.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo can be customized to fit your business needs, it isn't just a plug and play system - which is a good thing! I have used it to solve many business riddles - the need to track velocity in the sales funnel, the need to score leads for priority, streamlining and reporting on event/webinar marketing. What's great is that the tool is flexible enough to use for a number of different business use cases and customized to the needs of that particular business.

What do you like best?

Marketo is consistently ranked by analysts as a top automation solution, and I can finally see why! As a marketer, it’s simple to use but also robust for program management from creation to reporting. On a day-to-day basis I use Marketo within a B2B environment and we wouldn’t be able to function without it. It’s a key tool for my marketing strategy, one of our most used functionalities is cloning programs, tactics, and campaigns. This allows us to make fewer mistakes and maintain continuity from user-to-user, an efficiency for my nimble, growing team.

What I’d like to see is continued product improvement driven by customer voices. I’m excited for the new Mercury UI to debut in 2018!

What do you dislike?

As an admin within a small team, the uptime to full functionality can be like climbing a steep hill on a cold day. Simply put, learning this tool can feel cumbersome if it’s not your only responsibility. Luckily, the Marketing Nation Community combined with the product docs and Marketo University prove to be helpful resources for growing your knowledge. Within a year I was able to confidently learn the tool, contribute new ideas, and become a Marketo Certified Expert (MCE).

Service/support - Compared to other automation platforms, there seems to be limited support and desire for accounts to have a 1:1 communication on a regular basis with an account rep. We’ve recently been assigned a new rep and we're making progress.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Find a way to invest in Marketo and go all in! You will not be disappointed.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I’m able to centralize efforts by using the Launchpoint services to integrate my existing marketing/BI tools such as Klipfolio, Hootsuite, GoToWebinar, etc. and seek out new relationships with partners/vendors.

Marketo gives me the opportunity to seamlessly deliver information to the sales users in my organization through the Marketo Sales Insights tool in Salesforce as well as triggered alerts/emails. I really enjoy the speed of the Salesforce sync as we are able to create/monitor campaigns and attribute revenue almost instantly.

What do you like best?

I have used Marketo over 5 years as both a Director of Marketing for a B2B company and a marketing consultant. Marketo is more than a marketing automation system; it's a powerhouse that transforms your organization. When we started using Marketo our marketing efforts were like throwing darts at a wall and our department was regarded as a support team to sales. When we started rolling out Marketo for our email efforts, event management and lead tracking, we gained so much measurable insight on how our efforts impacted revenue. Marketo is a deep and wide program that will allow you to automate and personalize marketing efforts at a larger scale. The deep functionality to develop customized campaigns that listen and act based on your customers activities is unmatched.

In the last few years, Marketo has made huge strides in their customer service and training options. The free training options online are very impressive and the Marketo Summit has improved each year.

What do you dislike?

Marketo is so customizable that everything needs to be built from scratch, including operational campaigns to route leads and basic form tracking. This can be a daunting task for any marketing team, but it is especially challenging for smaller teams.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo is the cream of the crop amongst Marketing automation software. Although it may be challenging to learn, it is the most robust and scalable of all marketing automation programs. There is also a strong community of Marketo users and talent. If you make the investment to set-up and learn Marketo, it will pay off in the long run with a program that can grow and scale with your company.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo gives you the tools to run your marketing programs at scale while gathering the data you need to connect the programs to revenue. The biggest benefit I have experienced is that it has allowed my company and clients to put our marketing dollars into the programs that actually drive revenue. At my former company, we increased our return on marketing investment (ROMI) from 100% the first year we used Marketo to over 500% in year 3.

What do you like best?

One of the features that makes Marketo so powerful is the ability to build sophisticated behavior-based logic that can be used for lead scoring, moving people through the funnel, updating data, running operational campaigns, and more. I am a heavy user of Smart Campaigns and Smart Lists. I also appreciate all of the pre-built integrations available from the 400+ LaunchPoint partners

What do you dislike?

Performance has always been a problem. Performance problems are most evident when doing a search, moving from one asset to another, saving templates, running large reports. The Advanced Reporting tool (RCA) cannot handle large amounts of data, and only refreshes once every 24 hours, unless something has changed recently.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The biggest gain for every company I've worked with in Marketo is the visibility into the data, and the ability to report on it. The ability to show marketing influence on a closed-won deal.

What do you like best?

Marketo's power lies in its flexibility. If you are an experienced user, it is almost infinitely customizable to the specific needs of your business. Just about every aspect of our marketing program resides in Marketo, from our assets to our lead scoring to the automated processes that push data updates to Salesforce, alert our reps, and handle campaign attribution. We launch/track all of our campaigns in Marketo, and the array of available triggers/filters allow you to build complex flows to target and manage leads.

What do you dislike?

Email and landing page editors are subpar (and have been for a while). You may need to invest in outside development/design help if you do not have those resources in-house. Revenue Cycle Explorer, Marketo's answer to revenue attribution/BI tools, is also a weak point -- unlike the rest of Marketo, it is inflexible and a bit of a black box. Finally, tracking and reporting on web activity is difficult/unreliable. Marketo is not a replacement for Google Analytics.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Invest in training/onboarding if you're new to Marketo as an organization. As with any powerful business system, you can do quite a lot with it, but simply having it doesn't give you a strategy, and there's lots you can miss.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I always run into new features with templating, modules and campaign building. I feel like there's always more to learn each time I use it. It can be quick for the most part and the organization is limitless. It leaves for a clean environment especially with monitoring multiple campaigns, A/B testing, and scheduling. Overall it ends up taking care of you if you can take care of it.

What do you dislike?

Sometimes the features can also be overwhelming and the UI can kick you out if there are multiple users which is a pain. Also it doesn't quite sync up when you have multiple users so it can require a lot of refreshing. At times you could be editing a draft which technically creates a second version of the email until you approve and close it. The speed of the UI can also vary depending on how many users are working on the same publication which can be exhausting if it forces you to refresh and then deletes your work. Fortunately we work in external editors to build our HTMLs before dropping them into templates but I feel like there should be a better fail-safe system when drafts are created. The auto-save can only save you so much.

Recommendations to others considering the product

There's a steep learning curve but the juice is worth the squeeze

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It's a simple (somewhat easy) solution to scheduling and organizing campaigns, newsletters, and event emails. It also acts as a solid rich text editor once you figure out how to use the templating system properly.

What do you like best?

Marketo is an enterprise level marketing automation tool that allows companies to execute a marketing strategy across a variety of online/offline channels including email, webinars, events, social media, and more. I particularly like the Reports that are available, as well as the robust email editor and the ability to create Snippets and easily insert dynamic content.

What do you dislike?

Marketo has a steep learning curve, and sometimes can be too complicated for its own good. Additionally, every single asset has to be “approved” before put into use, which can be somewhat tedious.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo is not the cheapest solution available. If you’re going to use it, use it to its fullest potential across all channels. Ask yourself if you’re ready to migrate your marketing efforts into a single platform. Additionally, integration with Salesforce is important, but required a bit of heavy lifting for the technical implementation. You may need to outsource your initial migration.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo allows channel managers to operate within the same platform, thus providing visibility into results that everyone can easily access. In this way, it provides a lot of operational efficiencies for the business and allows actionable insights to occur quickly. It also allows for easy integration between channels, for example triggering a thank you email to attendees of a webinar. Or alternatively, a follow up email to people who signed up for a webinar but did not atttend. You can then pull reports for the performance of the program as a whole—not just email opens, or just webinar attendance, or just landing page white paper downloads, but a holistic view of the program.

What do you like best?

I honestly had such a horrible experience with Marketo that I cannot recall anything but the negatives.

What do you dislike?

We struggled significantly trying to set up and use Marketo to accomplish the most basic tasks to function as a Marketing department. We took every means necessary to ensure a smooth integration with Marketo during the onboarding and training process but nothing went smoothly at all despite our efforts. We invested in the learning passports, flewa Marketo representative on-site, utilized the Marketo .docs and reached out to support for assistance for assistance but ran into one issue after the next.

Bringing a Marketo consultant on-site did not resolve our issues since she was unable to solve our email issues since she was unfamiliar with the 2.0 templates / editor. The lack of support we experienced throughout the duration of our relationship with Marketo was astounding with the longest support ticket lasting 45 days without a response.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Request a demo/trial of Marketo and HubSpot and you will quickly see user unfriendly Marketo is to do simple tasks such as preparing an email.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I like the amount of data that can be gained from the work done. Email tracking, automation streams, and lead scoring are all amazing aspects that we never got with other ESPs. I also like that we gain the ability to A/B test and have dynamic and static content in emails that we can send to different audiences.

What do you dislike?

I do not like how long the setup is, nor do I enjoy going through such a manual process to set everything up. There seem to be more questions than answers when starting with Marketo. Also, we had a lot of trouble with our initial setup and our customer success person. With a small team and no dedicated person to run Marketo, it's a lot for the team to learn in a short amount of time. The way email creation is done is not ideal either in terms of easily creating and editing sections.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure you provide you and your team a LOT of time to review, study, and implement Marketo. It's definitely not "plug and play" like other ESPs. It is more manual like Google Analytics.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Tracking! The data we hope to get from our customers through your platform gives us hope for better-targeted marketing and e-commerce.

What do you like best?

The ability to understand each lead/customer in more detail, view their journey and optimise this based on specific trends of content and user engagement. How you can automate nurture and marketing in a tailored way for each prospect. Tracking lead lifeycycle and movement through the funnel, along with revenue attribution back to marketing. The ability to understand and qualify lead/customer engagement and handover to the sales team with all relevant information they need to make an informed touchpoint. The community of users is fantastic, really knowledgeable people who are always willing to help.

What do you dislike?

We have had issues with speed of the system in the years we've had in place. Although the guys in support are always willing to help.

Support can sometimes be slightly lacking with more complex requests, however the community and self-testing is really the best avenue for these types of scenarios

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

I am continually impressed by the Marketo Professional Services Team. They are responsive, thorough, and always thinking of the next thing in our evolution. This of course comes as a cost but I would not change our decision to use Professional Services.

Our Sales Executive is really legit. He is a true relationship manager and I feel like he cares genuinely about our success (Go Al Loges...Go!)

I love the software. It took me forever to just accept that it really was "that easy". I'd try to ask a serious question about something and try to over complicate the idea just to get a response "sure we can do that in one flow step". It's just very easy and powerful all at the same time!

What do you dislike?

I am not a fan of the "cases" at all. I don't like the ebb and flow of submitting trouble tickets via the Marketo Support page. The folks do respond in a timely manner and it's generally thorough but it's just clunky. The last thing that I want to do when I have a problem is go to a cumbersome web page and have this comment...wait...comment...wait process. It's just not ideal.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If I were to look back - I would tell myself to be best friends with my CRM admin and really understand how CRM works today to better understand the level of customization and creativity that would be needed in our implementation. I would say that if you don't have a robust marketing team that consider a professional services partner and not being cheap will pay off HUGE - especially if you are new to Marketing Automation.

Marketo provides a TON of resources and while that is amazing - it is also overwhelming. You will want to be cautious to not rabbit trail! It's easy :)

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Insights - We needed real time actionable insights to best position us for success in the engagement economy. Marketo provides more than most C-level folks can ingest.

There are so many benefits - increased sales efficiency, decrease operational efforts, improve the "right time, right person, with right content" problem, etc.

What do you like best?

There have been very few ideas that I have not been able to make come to fruition with the use of Marketo. We handle all of our communications as well both paid and organic efforts online. All of our landing pages are linked to Marketo and we can easily use the triggers and filters to get the right audience for each campaign. Marketo has many integrations, which allows it to easily fit into anyone's flow of work.

What do you dislike?

The UI/UX is so ugly it looks like it was made 10 years ago and never updated. This includes the forms and landing pages. We have ended up using a third party software to handle our landing pages and forms and chose one that had an integration with Marketo. Once the UI/UX is updated, this will be a much cleaner looking software, I hope. Sometimes our instance runs a little slow, but that might be just because of our database size. There are also some other very simple procedures that a ‘powerhouse’ like Marketo should have. The creation of new fields and syncing them to Salesforce is nightmare compared to Pardot and others. The ability to send in the prospect’s time zone is also something Pardot and Act-On have, but Marketo takes much more work. If you’re going to be a leader, don’t forget the small stuff.

Recommendations to others considering the product

This is the right choice for most companies. If you have "graduated" from simple email marketing campaigns, this is the route to go. Some other tools are too simple and will not handle certain tasks once your marketing efforts grow to a certain size. I have used several others, including Pardot, and Marketo is a step up for sure.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are a global company with many marketing needs. We use Marketo to communicate with both clients and prospects as well as monitor all of our marketing efforts to make data-driven decisions. We have many campaigns going out at a time and many of them run indefinitely. Marketo helps us when we meet with leadership be able to answer the tough questions and get a good indicator of ROI of different efforts.

What do you like best?

I like how I am able to take members from my free weekly course campaign that I run and automatically place every member of that campaign into a weekly mailing list and I can attach all of the SFDC campaigns to this effort so that the members of this B2C channel can continue to learn more about our product.

What do you dislike?

There are a few features about Marketo that are great but that are already being provided by other companies on a bigger and better scale. i.e. Adobe Analytics.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I think that most people know whether or not Marketo is the right step for their business. I think that Marketo is definitely a tool that should be used by bigger corporations and not so much small and emerging businesses.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

Marketo generally does what it's supposed to do and makes my life easier by programming mass emails in advance and reporting back on who opens them and when.

What do you dislike?

There is a lot. The user interface/editor leaves a lot to be desired. Did you know that the enter key doesn't do what you think it does? Apparently Shift+enter is the way to go. I am a fairly new user (past 6 months) and it just isn't as intuitive and dummy-proof as I would like. It's very easy to make a mistake and accidentally send things to the wrong list. I have no real clarity into how it overwrites a list when I update it (or does it not?) I also hate that it takes 15 minutes to program an email. Sometimes, I need to get messages out to all employees with some urgency and after the back and forth of internal edits, 15 more minutes to wait until delivery is not great.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Do your research on Marketo and other products. See if you can get a trial to evaluate it. I find it is glitchy and just all around cumbersome to use from many different angles. MAYBE it's because I'm a new user and don't know all the tricks yet but it's intimidatingly complex and I can't count on it working all the time.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I use Marketo for internal communications within a company with 1500 employees. It enables me to send emails from different members of our executive team without needing access to their inbox. It also allows me to send messages to different employee audience segments without having to manually enter each address into outlook. And it allows me to pull data on which emails get opened or not.

What do you like best?

1. Great ease of use for creation of campaigns. Marketo enables the use of templated landing pages and emails to make it easy to create messages and landing pages.

2. The engagement program capability makes it easy to create drip campaigns that deliver the right content at the right time in the sales process.

3. Webhooks and API capabilities that enable me to integrate Marketo and import and export to and from other applications.

4. There is a terrific user community that provides an opportunity to engage with others--both via face-to-face user group meetings as well as online. Other users are very willing to engage and provide answer and advice.

What do you dislike?

1. System can be slow at peak load for complex dynamic list selections.

2. Documentation sometimes trails availability of new features.

3. User documentation is 'green" and doesn't print well.

Recommendations to others considering the product

First, keep in mind that any marketing automation tool is going to amplify the quality of your underlying marketing strategy. If you have a strong marketing strategy, you'll see more positive results. If your strategy is poor, marketing automation will ensure your poor program is more widely exposed--but probably won't give you more results. Its not a panacea--you still need to think about your marketing strategy before automating.

Second, you'll need a content creation strategy that feeds the nurturing engine. Marketo makes it very easy to offer content in exchange for registration data--but if you don't have the content to offer, you won't get the data.

Third, data quality is important. Plan to spend time either before or after go-live on clearing dead contacts from your database, appending missing data, etc.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The basic business problems are generating revenue and optimizing the results from marketing programs. I've used Marketo in two different industries and been able to align

In an IT consulting firm, the business problems centered around lead generation and campaign management. We needed to generate leads to keep our sales teams engaged and drive new revenue. Before Marketo, we would run a lead generation campaign--a webinar or event--and sales would get tied up handling only the most active prospects. By the time they got around to the rest, the lead was far less likely to convert.

The other nice use as an IT reseller was to be able to report to partners providing MDF or other marketing funds just what their investment was getting--instead of saying that we did a webinar and signed up X number of people, we could show the nurturing campaign, pipeline, lead status, and overall campaign results.

In a publishing environment, we used Marketo to help drive new registrations, new subscriptions, ad sales, and as part of our content delivery (syndicated white papers, webinar registrations, etc.)

What do you like best?

The interface is relatively intuitive. They have a solid community which is helpful (albeit you need to be specific).

What do you dislike?

The backend of the product is a mess. Customizations are hard fought. Support is terrible - they often tell us things will work when they have no basis for those claims.

Recommendations to others considering the product

For basic email marketing, lead scoring, nurturing, analytics, its a good tool.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using Marketo to send notifications via the backend of our marketplace - meaning we end up in the backend a lot. Marketo is quite the cookie cutter solution. If you are using it for straightforward email marketing like drip campaigns, nurturing streams, analytics, it is solid. Any customizations and you'll need help from a marketo consultant.

What do you like best?

We enjoy using the Landing Page builder and the email template creator. It's much easier than having to submit to our design team and then have developers create it.

What do you dislike?

It's a robust system, built on an older interface, so it's not as user friendly as, say, mailchimp or some of the other newer software out there.

There's a lot of little quirks that you have to get used to, for instance, sometimes you need to upload images before you start creating your email templates.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Do your research. It's costly but can be worth it depending on what you're looking for.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We mainly use it to create landing pages, send emails, and track customers. It's great to have everyone in one database, and view whether or not they've visited a certain page, opened a certain email, etc.

What do you like best?

It's a very complex tool, you can do almost all marketing tasks and programs using this tool and it's easy to integrate with 3rd party tools.

The rule logic are very easy to learn and it's practically a joy to "play" with tasks in Marketo

What do you dislike?

Sometimes the rules can be quite tricky, it would be a great plus if they invest more in usability rules.

Recommendations to others considering the product

If you're looking into a great tool to automate very complex sort of programs and lead management (for a big database) this should be the tool you should go after. Even though some projects you encounter may prove challenging, I've personally learned that with a 2-3 days of self documentation you'll be able to properly execute them (even though your initial thoughts were: IMPOSSIBLE To DO)

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

- Lead gen: we improved the engagement of the visitors on our website and we manage the entire lead generation process on Marketo integrated with our CRM.

- Programs: it is easy to create and manage emailing and nurture programs with the ability to set rules when the email should be sent.

- Forms: we are using Marketo forms and we embedded them on our website.

What do you dislike?

- Integration with Dynamics: after 3 years we still have some issues on the integration with MS Dynamics... the 2 systems are not well integrated.

- Support: sometimes we had some issues with getting quick replies from support.

- Landing pages: it is missing a validation workflow on the thank you pages (to be sure that those who will access the thank you page have successfully filled-out the form included in the landing page).

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using Marketo across the whole organization to improve and automate our marketing activities. We are using it at corporate level as well as in each operation (US, UK, DACH, France, Italy, APAC, etc).

We improved ability to attract new leads and the engagement of visitors on our website.

What do you like best?

Marketo is a very intuitive platform. You can make nurture campaigns as simple or as complex as your business calls for. Support is great, and you really get the sense that the organization is listening to its customers. Also, they have a great onboarding program and robust user community. Additionally, they are constantly adding new functionality and have some really great offerings around personalization and ABM.

What do you dislike?

Landing page and email building were recently changed to make it "easier" for teams to crank out both. However, they took a bad WYSIWYG editor (for landing pages) and turned it into something you absolutely must know some HTML/CSS to work with. Similarly, emails are supposed to be easier to deal with, but not really. Finally, forms, especially compared to Hubspot, look outrageously dated and take serious custom work to make them look half way decent. `

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We have complex sales cycles that are very high touch. They require everyone to feel like we are speaking directly to their industry/role. Marketo lets us easily do this with set-it-and-forget-it nurture streams.

What do you like best?

I really like how much you can do with Marketo. Its base marketing product is fantastic in terms of what you can accomplish with the platform. From creating campaigns, sending responsive email, and tracking the success. But what's even better is the integration with so many other tools such as Salesforce, On24, Vidyard and so many more. Marketo is a great product and it relatively easy to dive into right out of the box.

What do you dislike?

There are a few things that I dislike about Marketo. As some others have mentioned, the platform can be very slow sometimes. When there's a lot of data syncing between Marketo and Salesforce it can take quite some time and put a backlog in activity data.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo can do wonders for your Marketing Team!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are currently using Marketo for as much as possible. We have it integrated with Salesforce so that we can track a customers and prospect activity. We create hundreds of email campaigns throughout the year to drive lead conversion and track responses. Marketo's integration with our webinar host On24 has been a great way for us to show our thought leadership within our space. I could go on and on with how we are routing alerts and tasks to different parts of our sales team based on the type of lead, their lead score, location, etc. The best part is that there are so many other things that Marketo does that we have not utilized yet, the potential is fantastic.

What do you like best?

There are a lot of possibilities in Marketo. From the way you build a campaign to every detail of the campaign. For this reason, you can customize you campaign virtually any way you want. They focus on what their good at and don't necessarily try to do everything. There are a lot of integrations with industry leaders (although I have not tried many personally).

What do you dislike?

The user interface is very difficult to understand. Nothing is intuitive so it takes A LOT of time in the tool to understand basic elements of the tool. The other part of this issue is the lack of accurate and detailed product documentation. You end up trapped in the tool spending an hour completing a task that should have taken 10 minutes. There is virtually no way to master the tool unless you can learn from someone who already knows it well (your account manager or someone on your company side).

Additionally, we were promised a lot on the sales side which ended up not being true. Marketo customer service in all departments (especially after working with HubSpot for 3 years) has been shockingly slow and across the board unhelpful.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Spend the extra money to go through live training with their staff. It is the only way you will learn the software.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

It truly is a tool that scales to the size of our client's needs. Being an agency, we wanted to offer our clients variety. One tool is not going to be a fit for everyone. Having Marketo in our portfolio allows us to offer larger clients a marketing automation platform that fits their audience size.

What do you like best?

I like that there are multiple ways to accomplish something in Marketo. The Marketo Community is the best resource - I'm always learning from how others build campaigns and programs and will always get a response when I ask questions.

What do you dislike?

I find Marketo easy to use when I'm in it on a day to day basis. However, it's easy to forget the quirks and tricks if you're not a regular user. It's not always intuitive, and I struggle with some of the reporting functionality.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Consider the size of your database and the number of programs you expect to run. Marketo is a great tool but I often see small companies purchase it when a cheaper tool would meet their needs.

If you do go with Marketo, the #1 thing to keep in mind is which fields to sync from SFDC -- you don't need them all! Be intentional about which fields you need for marketing purposes - syncing unnecessary fields will slow down the performance of your instance.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use it for website downloads, newsletter and email programs, lead lifecycle management, and reporting. Paired with Salesforce, Marketo is the hub of our marketing activities and lead data.

What do you like best?

Setting up basic automation, whether it's triggering scoring or emails through activities, works sufficiently. However, the key word here is "basic."

What do you dislike?

There's a bit of feature bloat that seems to have led to half-baked features that lack functionality. For example, I would love to use the nurture program type for our nurture streams, but I'm limited to sending emails once a week on a specific day per stream, so we've had to resort to using the default programs and smart campaigns to push leads through a nurture.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Since they've moved to a-la-carte pricing, triple check and make sure you know which features you're getting as part of your contract. Feature names change all the time, so for long-time users, this is even more important.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Prioritizing leads for our sales team was the main problem we wanted to solve, so scoring has been important in our implementation. We've also been able to give better visibility into our marketing campaigns by passing program engagement data into our crm.

What do you like best?

We really enjoyed using Marketo when it was outsourced to us by one of our clients. We found it very easy to set-up A/B campaigns, program emails and templates, and manage the analytics/reporting aspect of multiple email campaigns.

What do you dislike?

Marketo was very expensive and as a result, our client dropped it after a year. In addition, set-up was a total headache. We were constantly hit with additional fees for help in setting up an API between said client's product registration database and this tool and still wound up hiring a consultant to finish up the installation. Customer service was very hard to get a hold of and constantly reminded us that we were not paying for the upper echelon of customer service... a lame excuse for either not responding to our inquiries for days or giving us half-baked responses.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure your agency partner or in-house user has significant automation tool experience... this is a bit of a Ferrari so you don't want to "learn to drive" on a tool this sophisticated. Be very very upfront with the sales rep at Marketo about your needs regarding APIs, implementation, and level of customer service to avoid disappointment and extra fees later on.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Helped us to launch multiple, highly segmented marketing campaigns on behalf of one of our clients. Helped us to increase customer satisfaction and begin cross-selling and up-selling efforts on behalf of their dealer network.

What do you like best?

- I'm sure my instance falls victim to a poor implementation, but I've heard Marketo has the ability to execute more complex programs

What do you dislike?

TL;DR: I previously used Pardot at a former employer, and I regret ever complaining about Pardot after I started using Marketo.

- UX: just miserable. Many things are confusing and counter-intuitive. Basic functionality doesn't exist (like the ability to change a landing page template after you've created the page - you need to make a whole new page). You need to follow their "hierarchy" of rules to delete anything, easy to see why our instance has turned into a wasteland of unused emails, landing pages, smart campaigns, etc. You have to dig for things that should be done in one click.

- Smart Lists: if you want to include multiple lists on a send, you have to add them one-by-one (maddening when your sending a big email to many lists or a small email that you don't want to go to many people). Again, little things that make a huge difference. Using custom list logic is brutal (especially when you have to have a lot of rules, see point before). I often have to add multiple "do not include" rules because some people who should not get an email still end up on the list (this is maddening).

- Reporting: Marketo really makes it hard to find any sort of numbers. It's actually kind of amazing how difficult they make reporting - most marketing folks have been held accountable for KPIs and ROI for at least 5 years now.

- Lack of Accounts: this could be one of my biggest pet peeves - Marketo only counts contacts and leads as "people", and they have no functionality to use Accounts. Really frustrating if you want to run ABM programs and automate aspects of lead follow-up.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Look at Pardot

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

As we are still in the midst of our pilot, if the program does manage to to do what Marketo salespeople claim it is capable of, then it will be an indisposable tool for multi-touch attribution. The email and landing page editing tools are also intuitive and relatively easy to use.

What do you dislike?

The UI could definitely use some work - confusing and not very intuitive overall, strange organization of various components. Terminology used for channels, campaigns, tags, etc. is outside of the standard marketing vernacular and thus also confusing.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be sure that when you negotiate your onboarding SOW you are sure to be very specific about the support you will need in getting everything set up - you will inevitably require more support hours than anticipated.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Thre were 2 main reasons we brought on this platform:

1. Multi-touch attribution

2. Omni-channel marketing capability

Seeing as the platform is able to receive data from many channels but not automate campaign setup per results and trigger actions from channels (say, social for example), I don't know if you can call this a try omnichannel marketing tool. The only channel that can really be automated is email, and in absence of the ability to automate delivery of other channels in sync, true omnichannel marketing is not possible.

As to multi-touch attribution, again, the possibility is there, but in spite of the time its taken so far to get everything integrated, it is yet to be determined if this is a viable solution for this need.

What do you like best?

Intuitive UI. Simple to set up email, landing pages, track successes. Allows for template creation. Easy to integrate with SFDC and the most popular webinar programs. Great customer support. I've turned down job offers from companies that don't use Marketo. I switched from Eloqua to Marketo back in 2004 and have never looked back. I've implemented Marketo at the last 4 companies I've been with and will continue to advocate for this tool wherever I go.

What do you dislike?

I wish there was a way for me to copy my set up from one company and take it with me when I change jobs.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Stay away from Eloqua, HubSpot & Pardot.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I have control over my landing pages, email, lead scoring and management, internal notifications and all else that makes me look like a marketing rockstar. It is so easy to use that spinning up a new email campaign takes only as long as it takes me to write the copy. Managing the system is a breeze and doesn't require a lot of hands-on work.

What do you like best?

The flexibility of the software. Of course, no software is going to enable you to do every single thing your brain can come up with, but Marketo comes pretty close! We are able to market like never before through engaging streams of content and gather data through engagement programs and progressive profiling. Having our leads database, emails, engagement streams, and landing pages all in one tool enable us to really streamline our campaigns.

What do you dislike?

We see lags when loading smart lists and reports. Of course there can be some lag when pulling a very large list or a list with many filters, but even with simple lists sometimes there is a longer lag than I would have expected.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Use the community and Marketo support. The people on the community are wonderful resources, and if you can't find the answer there, Marketo support is fantastically able to answer questions and solve problems.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our primary objective has been to consolidate marketing efforts by integrating our database with lead prospecting through some truly wonderful engagement programs. Having our database integrated is bringing us closer and closer to presenting a holistic view of what our leads receive from us and how they engage with us. We are still early in our adoption; we have many plans to further realize the benefits Marketo will offer to our business for the future.

What do you like best?

It's hard to choose one thing about Marketo that I love. That being said, I find their software to be one of the most intuitive out there. Without any training, you could set up and send an email within minutes. The way the platform is set up allows for users to quickly find what they need and execute complex campaigns. The Marketo Community is one of the greatest resources you can use to educate yourself about the tool and collaborate with other users.

What do you dislike?

Their lack of truly responsive landing pages is a big dislike. This should be corrected with upcoming releases in May and June. I am not the biggest fan of their integration with SugarCRM, but Sugar is working to build a better connector. I wish that Marketo would support this CRM better, especially since SFDC aquired ExactTarget/Pardot.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Choose the right partner for implementation and be patient. Marketing Automation is a journey not a destination. With the wrong guide and an overly aggressive timeline, you will be setting yourself up for failure.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are consolidating our Marketing and Sales databases. This allows each department to utilize data collected by the other for the first time. This happens in near real time and it is forcing us to begin aligning goals and process more.

- The creation of email and landing page templates and the ability to clone programs and campaigns allow for both time-saving and fewer errors in creation

Resources:

- World-class Community enabling users to come together to share new product ideas, post discussions asking for guidance on overcoming marketing challenges, and share tips/tricks to get the most out of their Marketo investment.

- Product Docs allow in-depth documentation and examples on every tool available in Marketo.

- Marketo also offers a Certification program allowing users to showcase their Marketo proficiency

What do you dislike?

- Small bugs here and there, but you expect that with any marketing automation platform.

- Navigation could be a bit easier when jumping from different areas of the platform to others and having more access to perform functions from different areas (ex. cannot run “Lead Actions” from smart campaign’s results tab, program’s members tab, or Lead Details page)

- Product Docs, while allowing great in-depth documentation, tend to be out-of-date for product features that have since been updated

- Support will respond to a case fairly promptly, but sometimes it can take a few days for a final resolution

Recommendations to others considering the product

- Be prepared to spend adequate time in the first few months learning the basics of the system and researching the Community and Product Docs. There is going to be a steep learning curve here, but that is expected with implementing a system with such robust capabilities

- Be prepared to have Sales commit some time during the implementation of Marketo to make sure both teams are aligned in terms of lead scoring, lead flow, lead assignment, and sales alerts

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

- Sales would sometimes be unimpressed with the quality of leads Marketing would send over. Marketo’s lead scoring allows us to customize criteria for scoring and send the most qualified leads over to Sales. This means that the prospects Sales does contact will be much more receptive to our message and we can “strike while the pan is hot”.

- Nothing is worse than sending an email or building a program and having the wrong fields update or the wrong campaigns trigger. Marketo allows you to be proactive and see which assets, campaigns, and fields are being used by others to ensure careful building and less troubleshooting when things don’t happen as you expect them to.

What do you like best?

Of the many great thing I could say about Marketo, I would have to say the most impressive thing is how they listen to their customers and add the features that the people who use the system request. Every month there is a new release that has great new features. I have been using Marketo for almost 4 years and I have seen it evolve so much adding new features and improving user experience.

What do you dislike?

There is not much I dislike, but if I had to choose something it would be that at times the system can be slow when doing complicated smart lists. The basic reporting is OK but could use some improvement. As a consultant single sign on for multiple instances would be very useful It looks like project Orion should solve some of the performance issues

Recommendations to others considering the product

GET IT!

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I am a consultant so this changes depending on client need, but usually it revolves around being more efficient with their marketing and being able to report on the success.

What do you like best?

The interface is very easy to use even when setting up complex programs. There is a logic to how you go about things that follow the flow of most campaign design processes while helping ensure that you are covering all aspects of the campaign needed. It integrates seamlessly with our CRM (Salesforce), which makes the whole experience much easier to use. Workflow rules are both easy to design and easy to execute through the interface by making changes to leads both within Marketo and within the CRM.

What do you dislike?

There is a bit of a learning curve for users as well as administrators. There are plenty of resources online to help but one should not expect to load Marketo into your process and immediately log in and start building out complex programs. Some of the reporting could be expanded. For instance, it should be simpler to pull a report of individual member actions to an email without having to run a report for a portion and then the member list for the other and then combining it to get what we need.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure you vet and select a strong integration partner that not only helps you implement but also provides administrative and user level training.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are working towards aligning our Marketing Department more closely with Sales by having our activities focused on revenue goals. Marketo will be a significant part of that goal. We are also in the middle of a project to implement buyer's journey and more fully automate lead management.

What do you like best?

Marketo is a cloud-based marketing engagement platform built with marketers in mind above all else. The interface is easy to use and is very intuitive so new users are able to quickly learn how to harness its power. Marketo has enabled us to quickly develop and execute campaigns in minimal time (campaign cloning is AWESOME) with little reliance on technical/coding skills. My advice: Don't skimp on integration because when configured correctly...this thing is a marketing beast.

What do you dislike?

The Smart List reports can be extremely slow to run depending on the complexity of the request so you are encouraged to simplify the request as much as possible. The data visualizations generated in the analytics could stand for a serious refresh.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Clearly define your business objectives and any current pain points and then eliminate providers who do not meet all of your needs. Be thorough in your due diligence and ask all the use case questions you can think of. Invest in a proper integration. You will spend more upfront but it's well worth it in the long run.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo has solved a number of issues.

1. Efficiency: we operate with a lean marketing team so building and executing campaigns quickly is a must. Marketo allows you to quickly build the campaign or clone a previous one and can set up the entire series of messages (using flow steps) in just a few short minutes. In no time you can have a full-blown multi-email campaign launched.

2. Behavioral based targeting: Trigger campaigns are a breeze to set up and with the use of advanced Smart Campaign logic, 3rd party data integrations and the Marketo Munchkin code, you can get wicked crazy with your engagement efforts.

What do you like best?

At it's best, Marketo is a powerhouse in terms of tracking visitors, executing drip/nurture campaigns, and integrating 3rd party systems via it's API and webhooks. I use Marketo in a daily capacity to achieve nearly all of my marketing tasks and it's features tower over its competition. It's Munchkin script that cookies visitors is critical in helping me target/market to the appropriate audiences.

What do you dislike?

Just in the past year, i've experienced more server outages than in my entire 4 years of using Marketo. I'm not sure if it's because of their rapid growth, or because of it's new leadership not focusing on improving infrastructures, but it's incredibly frustrating when outages occur. My biggest pain, is that it not only locks me out of Marketo, but since I embed Marketo forms on WordPress and use it's API in other tools, Marketo's down instances will also affect those.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's costly but worth it in the end if you're serious about Marketing automation

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The business problem I needed to solve with Marketo is actively segmenting and targeting a variety of audiences in my database. I also needed to have a tool that helped me manipulate and track Marketing ROI in Salesforce. Marketo achieved both of these with its bidirectional Salesforce sync and it's smartlists/segmentation capabilities.

What do you like best?

I used Aprimo for a number of years, was an admin in the system and we moved to Marketo in 2013. The product has been improved dramatically over the last few years and it is now at a stage where it can be described with just one word - superb. There is a great community and help articles online, it is super easy and quick to get answers to all your questions, from beginner user to advanced.

What do you dislike?

Perhaps, I could say when there is an announcement of a new product feature, it sometimes takes a while till that feature becomes available but on the other hand, i guess it is not always easy for them to deliver as fast as we would like it to be. Also, the Marketo University, a learning portal for the product is still in the process of development, addition of the new content is a bit slow.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo should seriously be considered by any organisation today, small or big.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our main objective is demand generation, growing our leads database, nurturing of our leads and marketing alignment with sales. The main benefit we have with this platform is one centralised system for all marketing campaigns.

What do you like best?

I love how easy it is to create flows based on actions. And that flows are more than just sending emails, it can change data, update status, etc.. which is helpful to continue further communications.

What do you dislike?

I dislike some of the integration with salesforce. Any new field that is created will automatically be created in Marketo, which is great. The problem comes when a field name is editted/updated, that is a manual adjustment in Marketo. (This is mostly an issue because we are still in the building process). Since we are in higher ed, we tend to speak with student's parents.. this has been an uphill battle to communicate with them because we previously didn't consider them as individual records but have to treat them as so in this system.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Having access to an activity log is great, when we encounter an issue with a specific record it easy to search to see what went wrong.

What do you like best?

Once you're familiar with the program, the world is your oyster. It's extremely robust and can handle any marketing challenge you throw at it. I use it for email campaigns, nurture drips, real-time notifications on accounts and much more.

What do you dislike?

The program is not intuitive and really requires training to use it to its full potential. It's something that can take awhile to master. I don't know if it was my instance specifically, but things would break a fair amount and custom patches would have to be created for us by Marketo in order to fix the problem, which was really frustrating.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I used it for inbound marketing, nurturing prospects, breaking into accounts, and monitoring warm accounts. It has allowed the sales reps to focus on the accounts they are most likely to close, keep in touch with every account in their funnel, and help with reporting.

What do you like best?

I have been on companies that do not utilize tools like Marketo, so from that aspect, beggars can't be choosers. Utilizing a tool that shows insights into how your customers or prospects are engaging with your website or marketing campaigns is great. I love that I can see who is on my website, and who is opening emails.

What do you dislike?

Navigating marketo is difficult and you need to have someone who is an expert in it to admin it. I can't get information on a lot of the things I want and the views that my organization have set up for me can be clutter. From a sales perspective, I do not care about customers that are on my website so if I could remove that clutter that would be great.

Recommendations to others considering the product

You need to have a STRONG admin/power user to really maximize what you are getting out of this. I have a feeling there is a lot untapped potential within it strictly from a lack of knowing how to navigate it. Perhaps that means better training and support from Marketo.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

Essentially there's only little that you can't do with Marketo. You can set up email automation any way you want after you master the basics as long as you have all their nomenclature down from smart campaigns to smart lists and beyond. They are also willing to work with you and give you feedback and solutions to a problem or extra add-on you need. The organization of their matrix is pretty intense, and although the parameters might seem little annoying at first, it really does make you double check the work and make sure you are using the program correctly.

What do you dislike?

Sometimes I wonder if Marketo is putting me in constant rabbit holes. I follow the steps, expect one result and then get a different result. Campaigns will launch before its scheduled time or other times not at all. The reports you have to build yourself and then you still have to keep refreshing. Their event app is okay. Marketo has its own language and navigating it at the beginning is a bit challenging. Once you get the hang of it, everything starts making sense though. It seems that when you want to get something done with Marketo's team there's always an extra price to pay.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Really do your research when implementing an automation software. Also test and play with Marketo before taking the video lessons as it will be more helpful to ask the right questions when you know where you are getting stuck.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Marketo to streamline email automation and lead generation with our CRM software. We realize the potential that this product brings and it really opened our eyes on how we can get more advanced with automation and collect more qualified leads. We're also a lot closer with our sales team now. No more butting heads.

What do you like best?

Marketo is a robust platform that allows for sophisticated marketing automation and reporting capabilities for companies at various stages of demand generation maturity. The SFDC integration is deep and well thought-out, the community "Marketo Nation" is a very supportive and helpful network of marketers.

What do you dislike?

There are two learning curves - the technicality of the platform and the way in which each organization implements the system. It is difficult to hit the ground running without a seasoned user - as well as it is challenging to optimize a system that has not been well documented. Also, it is likely that in rushing to see short term ROI, users will setup the foundation, tagging, and categorization parts of the platform incorrectly which cause major headaches in the future.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Those considering Marketo or any other enterprise marketing automation platform should have a clear demand generation strategy with targets, objectives, and headcount to support.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our primary initiatives are demand generation, nurturing, and ROI reporting as well as marketing and sales alignment. The benefits we have realized are a central system for all marketing campaigns and reports and a streamlining of email and nurturing processes.

What do you like best?

Simple and natural to utilize – Marketo gets a great deal of acclaim for the ease of use of their stage. While it might not have the prettiest of UIs, everything is all around marked and simple to get used to, making selection less demanding than some different instruments.

What do you dislike?

Soak bounces in valuing – Marketo offers three standard evaluating levels, at $895, $1,795, and $3,175 every month. Every level opens new highlights, which implies that it may cost an extra $900 – $1,400 every month for only a modest bunch of additional highlights.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Marketo gets a considerable measure of acclaim for the ease of use of their stage. API is wonderful.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Snappy and simple to setup – Contrasted with a portion of Marketo's rivals, it's generally simple to actualize and get up and running.

Awesome client bolster and group – Marketo have an extraordinary client bolster group, and an extremely dynamic group of clients helping each other with crusades and specialized issues.

What do you like best?

Great marketing automation tool that allows marketers to track omni-channel touches for complete visibility of the influence on a prospect. Lots of integration options that are easy to set-up. Best in the market for operations leaders that need advanced segmentation and automation of backend processes.

What do you dislike?

The new community has also greatly deteriorated from what it once was - difficult to navigate and find what you're looking for and the links to old help articles no longer work.

Account management team is not fun to deal with, delays in providing information, low levels of customer service and completely lacking proactive anticipation of customer needs.

Annual price increases.

Recommendations to others considering the product

They're actively working on improving the customer experience, so I expect that the account management experience will be improved in the near future.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Omni-channel tracking for complete visibility of the lead lifecycle and associated influences. The system really enables a data-driven marketing organization and empowers us to demonstrate our impact on the business.

What do you like best?

Marketo is a great tracking tool for my organization. Gives great insight into what the client is interested in, when they click the item, and ultimately how to proactively engage with them. I like the time stamp tracking, and the links provided into what they clicked on. Its integration to SFDC makes it convenient to view everything in one window.

What do you dislike?

Not too many dislikes. It would be nice to change my view in SFDC so I can focus on what is important to me and my team.

Recommendations to others considering the product

I would highly suggest this to any sales and marketing team. It helps us automate our marketing efforts to ensure a proper follow up.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

When reaching out to prospects its valuable to understand what they want to know more about within our website. With this we can pinpoint and execute precise messaging to cater to them. The end goal is to procure business and Marketo gives us those insights to make better business decisions.

What do you like best?

I love the flexibility with regard to the ability to expand the platform and integrate with many different partners. It does not seem like something any company would grow out of. The programs are easy to build and the logic Is basically common sense. Campaign cloning and the pre-built engagement programs are truly a time saver. With ample time you can produce very professional, impressive emails and landing pages.

What do you dislike?

I think the 2.0 email templates need some work. There are a lot of errors in the code and the templates are not as flexible as some other systems. GA tagging is also something that is a lot more cumbersome with Marketo. I think that there could be some better Out of the Box reporting, more visual and lastly Landing Pages. With so many applications that offer quick and easy Landing page creation, Marketo could certainly ramp this up.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Better for teams of 2 or more that would be actively working in Marketo.

Some HTML knowledge goes a long way

Integrate as much as you can with Google Analytics

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We switched from Eloqua to Marketo and I have to say the implementation was so much easier. We have been able to successfully launch nurture programs, Events, tradeshows and all of our online advertising. One thing to keep in mind when choosing the right marketing automation software is the size of your team. Right now I am managing all aspects of running market as well as design, reporting, content creation, programming etc You name it. That is a tall order. I think Marketo is more suitable for a team of 3, or with some outsourcing. That said, I am managing and we have seen a nice increase in lead gen and revenue. A good developer could make all the difference!

What do you like best?

Having access to all databases and being able to zoom in on certain segments is a huge benefit to our business. That was our main attraction to Marketo. We also appreciate the ability to integrate our social media campaign results and website forms into the system.

What do you dislike?

Sometimes to many on our team, Marketo seems like a not-user-friendly jumbled mess. There are many icons, only certain ways to move items, many functionalities we haven't had a chance to pick up on. That can be very frustrating. We had a consultant in our office multiple times to assist, but we're continually being stumped and not sure how to move forward.

Recommendations to others considering the product

It's very, very complicated. Start slow. Work your way into its many features. Don't feel like you need to start off with a higher level right off the bat. Upgrade over time.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Ease of access to our database and segmentations without going through IT to obtain the information.

What do you like best?

Marketo provides one of the best customer support. The customer has the option to reach out the support team either via online case submission or phone support. Each case is categorised with appropriate urgency type, and depending upon the urgency level, the SLA for follow up is defined. If you are unsatisfied with the response, the case can be escalated to the next level.

What do you dislike?

There are many good things to like about Marketo such as customer support, user friendly interface, data management and revenue cycle analytics but in my opinion, Marketo's SSL certifications for landing page URLs and email tracking are expensive than other competitors. They can certainly improve here.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Ease of use, great customer support coupled with best multi touch attribution model, Marketo is the best choice in my opinion.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are the advanced level user of Marketo and we are using it for leads attribution, data management, multi channel attribution, data normalization, leads scoring, Nurture tracks, landing pages and lead categorization. Marketo is super cool with its dedeupe tool.

What do you like best?

The ability to clone a former email campaign saves time! It is easy to edit emails as well.

What do you dislike?

Lack of in product help, tips, reminder such as be sure to do this, best practices e.g. how to create smart logic for smart list, adding images to email. It would be great if you even provided a one-pager sheet with information and tips on how to navigate i.e. Marketo for dummies.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Make sure everyone in the organization has a basic understanding of how to use Marketo.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Allows us to send timely and targeted emails to our clients. This has improved our client engagement and retention. The reporting in each email campaign is not very detailed in order for us to measure email performance etc.

What do you like best?

I like that Marketo is very robust and has lots of functionality. We switched a little over a year ago from Pardot and have found that it is definitely a step up. We can do everything we were lacking before in Pardot.

What do you dislike?

The learning curve is quite steep. Everyone on the team has found it fairly challenging to learn and I still lack confidence in my ability. You really need at least one dedicated employee on the team to manage Marketo.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketing automation is what we are using it for. Email campaigns are the primary use. We also host landing pages and documents for downloading. It's important to have data on how all our campaigns are performing.

What do you like best?

Marketi is a good tool to use and provides alternatives to send email blasts.

What do you dislike?

While using it for the first time a couple of times, I screwed up on two email blasts.

The reason why I screwed up:

- I fixed a few typos from my email and after that I thought that since the light bulb icon seemed like it was still good to go, I didn’t know I had to set the flow again. After realizing this mistake, I can say that Marketo is a little tricky to use. I would love of you vould set up a system that could warn the user that they haven’t set the flow so they don’t waist time and money.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Be careful when you fix an edit an email as it automatically un matches de flow of the email with the list and you may wind up with no email blast and no information about the blast.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Due to my mistake, we were able to quickly solve the issue and do A/B testing which greatly helped out to acquire registration.

What do you like best?

Marketo is the best associated with the best. Coming from contributes to customers, business lead course-plotting in order to triggered activities, Marketo helps get our causes the best folks in document period. It is not only assisted trail our leads far more specifically, but allowed all of us to learn innovations. Not really only is Marketo by itself wonderful, but their power to combine with Salesforce provides all of us with your own data they desire plus need to make selections. The favourite feature, and will certainly continually be the most popular function, is the Marketo wise list. Intelligent list really are a godsend. They're suitable for slicing and dicing data specifically how you would such as.

What do you dislike?

The precise Marketo UX is inside need of a fix. Getting folders is wonderful, nevertheless it's pretty difficult to get anything within those folders, typically the search functionality is deficient. In creating program strategies, it would be genuinely helpful to have a visible workflow.

Recommendations to others considering the product

For several SMBs I'd advise applying Marketo over Eloqua, Silverpop, Pardot, or other marketing and advertising automation suites. i've applied Eloqua heavily, and although the tool is strong, the complete interface (even typically the E10 interface which We all have used) still droplets short of what Marketo offers. I've evaluated the two Silverpop and Pardot in addition to both of those stay away from offer the bang regarding buck that Marketo may.

If budget is a new real concern to suit your needs an individual may want to try out ActOn. I set that up for a consumer but it fits their requires really well, though their particular needs aren't that fantastic.

If you are a new newer company promote items, and don't must employ SalesForce for a CONSUMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT I'd recommend InfusionSoft. InfusionSoft is a lot more affordable than Marketo although it too lacks a few of the Marketo features.

All around, I'm happy with Marketo as a device and much more happy with this as a company. Even though I've had some limited support issues with Marketo, they may be generally reactive. Because a company they might doing some awesome points and applying a excellent deal of pressure in order to Eloqua, as they possess faster development cycles and appear to be a a lot more agile company.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We all automate all of the marketing emails out regarding the platform, and typically the trust I have inside it to send these people out when scheduled excellent.

What do you dislike?

Speed: Sometimes lists take a long time to run if you have a lot of filters.

Reporting: Email reports and email insights are good, but the rest of the reporting is basic.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Marketo is utilized across our entire global marketing team. We use it for online advertising campaigns, webinars, lead nurturing, lead scoring, lead lifecycle and customer marketing. The bi-directional sync with Salesforce allows our sales development team to follow up with new leads quickly and the Sales Insight plugin gives our sales team visibility into our marketing campaigns.

What do you like best?

I love how thought out the platform is and the endless possibilities that exist in Marketo. So many different programs and campaigns you can create and run in addition to being able to easily track their performance. Considering how much you can do in this one platform it's relatively easy to pick up and understand. Not only can everything be automated but can easily be scaled to streamline work processes, etc.

The use of tokens is one of my favorite features extremely helpful when cloning similar programs/campaigns so scaling processes is not as much of a nightmare. Also helpful for personalizing marketing efforts.

What do you dislike?

One of the issues we faced was lead syncing with SFDC and list uploads interfering with email send date/times. At one point we had to schedule our emails 2 hours before we actually wanted it to be sent out because for some reason our sends would be delayed by extended amounts of time. My main issue with Marketo has been random periods of slow down but most programs/platforms have a similar issue, not a deal breaker.

Another issue I know is pretty common is if you don't set up Marketo precisely how they recommend and you go a little rogue on certain aspects, it can make it harder to take advantage of all the great features they offer such as revenue explorer and some of the reporting in analytics.

The support team was another issue we experienced with Marketo. I know their support teams have relocated and maybe we just got unlucky with our assigned rep but at one point contacting Marketo support was a bigger issue than our original problem, some support reps are the complete opposite of helpful but I think they've gotten better. Haven't experienced any serious issues in a while but I guess it's a wild card.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Demand generation - Marketo helps us perform most if not all of our online marketing programs as well as being able to track them. Also helps strengthen the connection between Marketing and Sales and helping our sales team interact with leads and customers as well.

What do you like best?

Marketo offers excellent marketing automation, analytics, and easy integration with your company's CRM (Salesforce.com for us). Their support is world class and their Marketing Summit is always an enjoyable conference.

What do you dislike?

I don't like the way that Marketo forces you to keep every single field you add. Other platforms allow fields to be deleted if they have not been used or if there is no data collected. I would also like the ability to have marketo forms write data to custom objects. You currently have to use the API for this and most customers won't have the expertise to achieve this integration.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use Marketo to effectively manage our customer interaction on our digital properties. We're able to track them across multiple websites and alert our sales team when a customer's digital body language shows they are ready for a sales call. We also use Marketo to manage a world class user email preference center.

What do you like best?

Marketo is very deep in features and options for customizing content and pulling detailed data points. You are able to utilize queries and build content in several ways- which makes building custom email segments and creative flexible.

What do you dislike?

Marketo is missing a lot. Our onboarding person was so bad we finally had to request a new person, and by then it was kind of too late to get started properly. The customer service is slow to the point of pointless, taking 3-5 days to answer a simple request. The entire Marketo instance has gone down for us for hours at a time- 3 times in the last 6 months. Basic features are missing without buying expensive add-ons- no basic reporting dashboards for an email, and I was finally told my customer service that heat mapping clicks on an email wasn't even possible. Note here: I have been building email for companies and agencies for 10 years, and have worked with many of their competitors. It is nonsensical to me that Marketo is considered top of class. Maybe for giant companies that have a bank of programmers and do everything in their CRM, but for a small shop doing basic marketing? No go.

Lead scoring- there is not an option to have lead scores only capture activity within a set period of time, then to have scores based on a list field that don't decay. Recency is very important to our team, and it was a big challenge to try to work within the limited feature set.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Before starting with Marketo make a list internally of every feature you are using with your current service to make certain those features are available at all, and at what additional charge.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I have really liked the detail and specificity in the sales alerts we were able to set up. The query based list management and options for pathing and segmenting are great.

What do you like best?

I've been using Marketo for several years now, and I'm excited to see how much they've grown. They continue to release features that helps me in all aspect of email marketing from executing an email deployment to email reporting.

The use of tokens is a huge plus for me as it allows me to double dip off one email creative to send to hundreds of people. Segmentation is also a plus factor here which allows me to target audience by demographics (e.g. location, company, age).

What do you dislike?

The reporting section can be improved. Although it's exciting to see quarterly releases, sometimes not all features work as intended. For example, Email Insight is a great tool to use, but the accuracy of the data is questionable which results in many limitation.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

What do you like best?

Data value changes, every field can be tracked via the "Data value was changed" filter, strong and complete sync with CRM (we use Salesforce), email customization, easy interface, great program buildout capabilities

What do you dislike?

List pulling can take a while, but is always true to the logic in the rules. List exporting takes a bit to process and load. Sometimes the sync between Marketo and the CRM needs some spot checking.

Recommendations to others considering the product

Consulting hours are so useful and help to set up the behind-the-scenes flow steps that automate data values

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Database, reporting and analysis, supportive community that has an answer 99% of the time, customization with email design and landing pages

What do you like best?

It is a robust tool for marketing automation. In terms of bells and whistles, it is one of the top two, ranking up there with Eloqua.

What do you dislike?

Extremely expensive and they raise their prices by a significant amount each year. They charge based on the number of leads you have, which means they also charge you for hosting unsubscribes...which you can't email. Their sales staff can also be a bit on the arrogant side. It depends on who you get, but I have run into it more often than not there.

Additionally, I found that their shared IP addresses were not getting good delivery rates. They assured me that the IP address we were on was not blacklisted and clean, but most of the emails we were sending ended up in my spam folder. We switched to a dedicated IP, which was decidedly more expensive...but has really helped our delivery rate.

What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Nurturing leads, tracking form fills, etc. Marketo is a great tool to use for warming up leads. They have a number of other options for upsell as well, but we have not implemented. It is expensive and gets more so every year. We are currently using it, but if we don't end up doing more than nurturing with it this year, we may look at other options as there are a variety of them out there that are less expensive.